Israel Needs a Divorce — From the Palestinians and Its Own Prime Minister

But even by those standards, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s recent and unusually vituperative campaign against his successor, Benjamin Netanyahu, has by turns surprised, provoked and, depending on their political persuasion, infuriated Israelis.

Barak, the longtime Labor Party leader who handily beat Netanyahu and then lost his post in 2001 after the collapse of American-brokered peace talks with the Palestinians but later went on to serve in Netanyahu’s cabinet as defense minister, retired from politics a few years back. But it seems he couldn’t stay out of the public arena for long. Over the past year, he’s re-emerged to trash Netanyahu in a variety of Israeli forums, a critique he took international over the weekend with a scathing New York Times op-ed that said Israel must be saved from its own government and blasted Netanyahu as “irrational, bordering on messianic.”